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Rating: 
Summary: An outstanding book
Review: Before reading this book, I had read several first-rate books dealing with environmental issues; books that tended to approach the subject from a biological (ecological) point of view. Although they were very useful and I learned a lot from them, I thought that they largely overlooked human/social factors, or treated them superficially. I intuitively felt that any analysis of sustainability (or whatever you want to call it) that was not also firmly based in the social sciences and the humanities was incomplete. In short, I decided to keep looking.I first encountered Alf Hornborg in a recent issue of an academic journal devoted to biosemiotics. The content and clarity of his article there so impressed me that I searched for more information about him on the Internet, discovered that he had written this book, and took the chance of ordering it. The book is all I had hoped for, and then some. I believe this author has seen more deeply into our environmental predicament than anyone I have yet encountered. Hornborg's main thesis, as stated in the introduction, is that we are "caught in a collective illusion about the nature of modern technology. We do not recognize that what ultimately keeps our machines running are global terms of trade. The power of the machine is not _of_ the machine, but of the asymmetric structures of exchange of which it is an expression." He goes on to state: "My argument represents a conjunction of perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. It is polemical in relation to most conventional discourse on 'sustainable development,' ecological economics, and similar topics in suggesting that solutions to our ecological predicament will have to be more profound and radical than is usually envisioned in the environmental debate. I argue for a _defamiliarization_ of our conventional conceptions of technology and development, that is, a fundamental distancing from the cultural categories through which the modern economic system operates, and in terms of which most policy negotiations are conducted. Above all, I argue that we must recognize the global, _distributional_ aspects of development, technology, and environmental issues. The intellectual ancestry of these ideas can be traced to the underexplored interfaces between world system theory, political ecology, ecological economics, economic anthropology, fetishism theory, and semiotics." The heart of the book, in my opinion, is in chapters 8 through 11. Chapters 9 and 10 are particularly outstanding. Rather than try to summarize the material, which would be hard to do in this brief space, I will close with some brief excerpts from chapter 10, which should impart some of the flavor of what is here: "Romanticist critiques of Western rationality have a long history, but studies in human ecology seem now to be in a position to articulate a _rational_ critique of that rationality. The contextualist position is not romanticism or mysticism but a sober recognition of the limitations of totalizing institutions and knowledge systems. Because of the sheer complexity and specificity of ecosystemic interrelationships and fluctuations, it is not unreasonable to expect that optimal strategies for sustainable resource management are generally best defined by local practitioners with close and long-term experience of these specificities, and with special stakes in the outcome. Yet it is clear that actual management strategies are today generally informed by entirely different sets of conditions." ... "Metaphor is a mode of knowing that positions the human subject by _evoking_ non-objectifiable inner states associated with specific forms of practice. The significance of metaphor for the contextualist argument thus lies in its capacity to activate tacit, practical knowledge based on experience of highly specific, local conditions. This position accommodates Ingold's proposition that cultural constructions of the environment are secondary to practical action ('the practitioner's way of knowing'), while recognizing the capacity of such constructions to codify and reinforce a specific, ecological _habitus_, not least in the transmission of such dispositions between generations. A metaphorical 'cognized model' does not so much encode ecological information as provide 'cues' for the activation of specific, practical repertoires appropriated in the context of action." ... "The discussion on 'traditional ecological knowledge' and 'traditional resource management' is thus intrinsically paradoxical to the extent that it hopes for an appropriation and application of local knowledge by the very modernist framework by which such knowledge is continually being eclipsed. In advocating what he calls 'epistemological decentralization,' Banuri recognizes that an increasing contextuality of knowledge will render 'the expert, trained in universal sciences, an anachronism.' Clearly, an 'expert' in an abstractly conceived field of 'local knowledge' is a contradiction in terms. But this paradox, of course, is a pervasive aspect of the anthropological condition. We can engage in a meta-discourse on knowledge, but in terms of concrete expertise we can at best become awkward apprentices to specific, local practitioners. Rather than approach indigenous knowledge as another 'resource' to be tapped, ecological anthropology might concentrate on the sociocultural contexts that allow ecologically sensitive knowledge systems to evolve and persist over time. There are reasons to believe that the best conditions for such local calibrations occur precisely when they are _not_ being subjected to attempts at encompassment by totalizing frameworks of one kind or another. In recognizing implicit and inextricable local meanings as the very stuff of ecological resilience, a critical inquiry into human ecology might begin to confront the agents of destruction by modifying its own ambition to encompass."
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